Falling Free

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Van Atta frowned at him from the clutter of printouts, his computer vid scintillating multi-screened and colorful with assorted Habitat schematics. "Now what, Leo? I'm busy. Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."

  And those who can't teach, Leo finished silently, go into administration. He maintained his usual bland smile, not letting the edged thought show by any careless gleam or reflection. "I've been thinking, Bruce," Leo purred. "I'd like to volunteer for the job of dismantling the Habitat."

  "You would?" Van Atta's brows rose in astonishment, lowered in suspicion. "Why?"

  Van Atta would hardly believe it was out of the goodness of his heart. Leo was prepared. "Because as much as I hate to admit it, you were right again. I've been thinking about what I'm going to bring away from this assignment. Counting travel time, I've shot four months of my life—more, before this is done—and I've got nothing to show for it but some black marks on my record."

  "You did it to yourself." Van Atta, reminded, rubbed his chin upon which the bruise was fading to a green shadow, and glowered.

  "I lost my perspective for a little while, it's true," Leo admitted. "I've got it back."

  "A bit late," sneered Van Atta.

  "But I could do a good job," argued Leo, wondering how one could achieve the effect of a hangdog shuffle in free fall. Better not overdo it. "I really need a commendation, something to counterweight those reprimands. I've had some ideas that could result in an unusually high salvage ratio, cut the losses. It would take all the scut work off your hands and leave you free to administer."

  "Hm," said Van Atta, clearly enticed by a vision of his office returning to its former pristine serenity. He studied Leo, his eyes slitting. "Very well—take it. There're my notes, they're all yours. Ah, just send the plans and reports through my office, I'll send 'em on. That's my real job, after all, administration."

  "Certainly." Leo swept up the clutter. Yes, send 'em through you—so you can replace my name with your own. Leo could almost see the wheels turn, in the smug light of Van Atta's eyes. Let Leo do the work, and Van Atta siphon off the credit. Oh, you'll get the credit for how this project ends all right, Brucie-baby—all of it.

  "I'll need a few other things," Leo requested humbly. "I want all the quaddie pusher crews that can be spared from their regular duties, in addition to my own classes. These useless children are going to learn to work like they never worked before. Supplies, equipment, authorization to sign out pushers and fuel—gotta start some on-site surveying—and I need to be able to commandeer other quaddie spot labor as needed. All right?"

  "Oh, are you volunteering for the hands-on part too?" A fleeting vindictive greediness crossed Van Atta's face, followed by doubt. "What about keeping this under wraps till the last minute?"

  "I can present the preplanning as a theoretical class exercise, at first. Buy a week or two. They'll have to be told eventually, you know."

  "Not too soon. I'll hold you responsible for keeping the chimps under control, you copy?"

  "I copy. Do I have my authorization? Oh—and I'll need to get an extension against my downside gravity leave."

  "HQ doesn't like that. Liability."

  "It's either me or you, Bruce."

  "True . . ." Van Atta waved a hand, already sinking back gratefully from harried to languid mode. "All right. You got it."

  A blank check. Leo tamped a wolfish grin into a fawning smile. "You'll remember this, won't you Bruce—later?"

  Van Atta's lips too drew back. "I guarantee, Leo, I'll remember everything."

  Leo bowed himself out, mumbling gratitude.

  * * *

  Silver poked her head through the door to the crèche mother's private sleep cubicle. "Mama Nilla?"

  "Sh!" Mama Nilla held her finger to her lips and nodded toward Andy, asleep in a sack on the wall with his face peeping out. She whispered, "For heaven's sake don't wake the baby. He's been so fussy—I think the formula disagrees with him. I wish Dr. Minchenko were back. Here, I'll come out in the corridor."

  The airseal doors swished shut behind her. In preparation for sleep Mama Nilla had exchanged her pink working coveralls for a set of flowered pajamas cinched in around her ample waist. Silver suppressed an urge to clamp herself to that soft torso as she had in desperate moments when she was little—she was much too grown-up to be cuddled anymore, she told herself sternly. "How's Andy doing?" she asked instead, with a nod toward the closed doors.

  "Hm. All right," said Mama Nilla. "Though I hope I can get this formula problem straightened out soon. And . . . well . . . I'm not sure you could call it depression, exactly, but his attention span seems shorter, and he fusses—don't tell Claire that, though, poor dear, she has enough troubles. Tell her he's all right."

  Silver nodded. "I understand."

  Mama Nilla frowned introspectively. "I wrote up a protest, but my supervisor blocked it. Ill-timed, she said. Ha. More like Mr. Van Atta has her spooked. I could just . . . ahem. Anyway, I've been turning in overtime chits like crazy, and I requested an extra assistant be assigned to my crèche unit. Maybe when they realize that this foolishness is costing them money, they'll give in. You can tell Claire that, I think."

  "Yes," said Silver, "she could use a little hope."

  Mama Nilla sighed. "I feel so badly about this. Whatever possessed those children to try to run off, anyway? I could just shake Tony. And as for that stupid security guard, I could just . . . well." She shook her head.

  "Have you heard any more about Tony, that I could pass on to Claire?"

  "Ah. Yes." Mama Nilla glanced up and down the corridor, to assure herself of their privacy. "Dr. Minchenko called me last night on the personal channel. He assures me Tony's out of danger now. They got that infection under control. But he's still very weak. Dr. Minchenko means to bring him back up to the Habitat when he finishes his own gravity leave. He thinks Tony will complete his recovery faster up here. So that's a bit of good news you can pass on to Claire."

  Silver calculated, her lower fingers tapping out the days unobtrusively below Mama Nilla's line of sight, and breathed relief. That was one massive problem she could report to Leo as solved. Tony would be back before their revolt broke into the open. His safe return might even become the signal for it. A smile lit her face. "Thanks, Mama Nilla. That is good news."

  * * *

  Revolution 101 for the Bewildered, Leo decided grimly, should be his course title. Or worse—050: Remedial Revolution . . .

  The shell of floating quaddies hovering expectantly around him in the lecture module had been officially augmented by both the off-duty pusher crews, and loaded with all the off-shift older quaddies Silver had been able to contact covertly. Sixty or seventy altogether. The lecture module was jammed, causing Leo to jump ahead mentally and think about oxygen consumption and regeneration plans for the reconfigured Habitat. There was tension, as well as carbon dioxide, in the air. Rumors were afloat already, Leo realized, God knew in what mutant forms. It was time to replace rumors with facts.

  Silver waved all-clear from the airseal doors, turning all four thumbs up and grinning at Leo, as one last T-shirted quaddie scurried within. The airseal doors slid shut, eclipsing her as she turned to take up guard duty in the corridor.

  Leo took up his lecture station in the center. The center, the hub of the wheel, where stresses are most concentrated. After some initial whispering, poking, and prodding, they hushed for him to an almost frightening attentiveness. He could hear them breathing. We would need you even if you weren't an engineer, Leo, Silver had remarked. We're all too used to taking orders from people with legs.

  Are you saying you need a front man? he'd asked, amused.

  Is that what it's called? Her gaze upon him had been coolly pragmatic.

  He was getting too old; his brain was short-circuiting to some distant rock beat, slipping back to the noisier rhythms of his adolescence. Let me be your front man, baby. Call me Leo. Call me anytime, day or night. Let me help. He eyed the closed airsea
l doors. Was the man waving the baton at the front of the parade pulling it after him—or being pushed along ahead of it? He had a queasy premonition he was going to learn the answer. He woofed a breath, and returned his attention to the lecture chamber.

  "As some of you have already heard," Leo began, his words like pebbles in the pool of silence, "a new gravity technology has arrived from the outlying planets. It's apparently based on a variation of the Necklin field tensor equations, the same mathematics that underlie the technology we use to punch through those wrinkles in space-time we call wormholes. I haven't been able to get hold of the tech specs yet myself, but it seems it's already been developed to the marketable stage. The theoretical possibility was not, strictly speaking, new, but I for one never expected to see its practical capture in my lifetime. Evidently, neither did the people who created you quaddies.

  "There is a kind of strange symmetry to it. The spurt forward in genetic bioengineering that made you possible was based on the perfection of a new technology, the uterine replicator, from Beta Colony. Now, barely a generation later, the new technology that renders you obsolete has arrived from the same source. Because that's what you have become, before you even got online —technologically obsolete. At least from GalacTech's point of view." Leo drew breath, watching for their reactions.

  "Now, when a machine becomes obsolete, we scrap it. When a man's training becomes obsolete, we send him back to school. But your obsolescence was bred in your bones. It's either a cruel mistake, or, or, or"—he paused for emphasis—"the greatest opportunity you will ever have to become a free people.

  "Don't . . . don't take notes," Leo choked, as heads bent automatically over their scribble boards, illuminating his key words with their light pens as the auto-transcription marched across their displays. "This isn't a class. This is real life." He had to stop a moment to regain his equilibrium. He was positive some child at the back was still highlighting 'no notes—real life', in reflexive virtue.

  Pramod, floating near, looked up, his dark eyes agitated. "Leo? There was a rumor going around that the company was going to take us all downside and shoot us. Like Tony."

  Leo smiled sourly. "That's actually the least likely scenario. You are to be taken downside, yes, to a sort of prison camp. But this is how guilt-free genocide is handled. One administrator passes you on to the next, and him to the next, and him to the next. You become a routine expense on the inventory. Expenses rise, as they always do. In response, your downsider support employees are gradually withdrawn, as the company names you 'self-sufficient.' Life support equipment deteriorates with age. Breakdowns happen more and more often, maintenance and resupply become more and more erratic.

  "Then one night—without anybody ever giving an order or pulling a trigger—some critical breakdown occurs. You send a call for help. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody knows what to do. Those who placed you there are all long gone. No hero takes initiative, initiative having been drained by administrative bitching and black hints. The investigating inspector, after counting the bodies, discovers with relief that you were merely inventory. The books are quietly closed on the Cay Project. Finis. Wrap. It might take twenty years, maybe only five or ten. You are simply forgotten to death."

  Pramod's hand touched his throat, as if he already felt the rasp of Rodeo's toxic atmosphere. "I think I'd rather be shot," he muttered.

  "Or," Leo raised his voice, "you can take your lives into your own hands. Come with me and put all your risks up front. The big gamble for the big payoff. Let me tell you"—he gulped for courage, mustered megalomania—for surely only a maniac could drive this through to success—"let me tell you about the Promised Land. . . ."

  Chapter Nine

  Leo stretched for a look out the viewport of the cargo pusher at the rapidly-enlarging transfer station. Damn. The weekly passenger ship from Orient IV was already docked at the hub of the wheel. Newly arrived, it was doubtless still in the off-loading phase, but nothing seemed more likely to Leo than for a pilot—or ex-pilot—like Ti to invite himself aboard early, to kibitz.

  The jumpship was blocked from view as they spiraled around the station to their own assigned shuttle hatch. The quaddie piloting the pusher, a dark-haired, copper-skinned girl named Zara in the purple T-shirt and shorts of the pusher crews, brought her ship smartly into alignment and clicked it delicately into the clamps on the landing spoke. Leo was encouraged toward belief in her top rating among the pusher pilots after all, despite his qualms about her age, barely fifteen.

  The mild acceleration vector of the station's spin at this radius tugged at Leo, and his padded chair swung in its gimbals to the newly-defined 'upright' position. Zara grinned over her shoulder at Leo, clearly exhilarated by the sensation. Silver, in the quaddie-formfit acceleration couch beside Zara, looked more dubious.

  Zara completed the formal litany of cross-checks with transfer station traffic control and shut down her systems. Leo sighed illogical relief that traffic control hadn't questioned the vaguely-worded purpose of their filed flight plan—"Pick up material for the Cay Habitat." There was no reason they should have. Leo wasn't even close to exceeding his powers of authorization. Yet.

  "Watch, Silver," said Zara, and let a light-pen fall from her fingers. It fell slowly to the padded strip on the wall-now-floor and bounced in a graceful arc. Zara's lower hand scooped it back out of the air.

  Leo waited resignedly while Silver tried it once, too, then said, "Come on. We've got to catch Ti."

  "Right." Silver pulled herself up by her upper hands on her headrest, swung her lowers free, and hesitated. Leo shook out his pair of gray sweat pants he'd brought for the purpose, and gingerly helped her pull them over her lower arms and up to her waist. She waved her hands and the ends of the pant legs flopped and flapped over them. She grimaced at the unaccustomed constraint of the bundled cloth upon her dexterity.

  "All right, Silver," said Leo, "now the shoes you borrowed from that girl running Hydroponics."

  "I gave them to Zara to stow."

  "Oh," said Zara. One of her upper hands flew to her lips.

  "What?"

  "I left them in the docking bay."

  "Zara!"

  "Sorry . . ."

  Silver blew out her breath against Leo's neck. "Maybe your shoes, Leo," she suggested.

  "I don't know . . ." Leo kicked out of his shoes, and Zara helped Silver slip her lower hands into them.

  "How do they look?" said Silver anxiously.

  Zara wrinkled her nose. "They look kinda big."

  Leo sidled around to catch their reflection in the darkened port. They looked absurd. Leo regarded his feet as though he'd never seen them before. Did they look that absurd on him? His socks seemed suddenly like enormous white worms. Feet were insane appendages. "Forget the shoes. Give 'em back. Just let the pant legs cover your hands."

  "What if someone asks what happened to my feet?" Silver worried aloud.

  "Amputated," suggested Leo, "due to a terrible case of frostbite suffered on your vacation to the Antarctic Continent."

  "Isn't that on Earth? What if they start asking questions about Earth?"

  "Then I'll—I'll quash them for rudeness. But most people are pretty inhibited about asking questions like that. We can still use the original story about your wheelchair being lost luggage, and we're on our way to try to get it back. They'll believe that. Come on." Leo backed up to her. "All aboard." Her upper arms twined around his neck, and her lowers clamped around his waist with slightly paranoid pressure, as she cautiously entrusted her newfound weight to him. Her breath was warm, and tickled his ear.

  They ducked through the flex tube and into the transfer station proper. Leo headed for the elevator stack that ran up—or down—the length of the spoke to the rim where the transient rest cubicles were to be found.

  Leo waited for an empty elevator. But it stopped again, and others boarded. Leo had a brief spasm of terror that Silver might try to strike up a friendly conversation—he should have
told her explicitly not to talk to strangers—but she maintained a shy reserve. Transfer station personnel gave them a few uncomfortable covert stares, but Leo gazed coldly at the wall and no one attempted to broach the silence.

  Leo staggered, exiting the elevator at the outer rim where the gee forces were maximized. Little though he wished to admit it, three months of null-gee deconditioning had had its inevitable effect. But at half-gee, Silver's weight didn't even bring their combined total up to his Earthside norm, Leo told himself sternly. He shuffled off as rapidly as possible away from the populated foyer.

  Leo knocked on the numbered cubicle door. It slid open. A male voice: "Yeah, what?"

  They had cornered the jump pilot. Leo plastered an inviting smile on his face, and they entered.

  Ti was propped up on the bed, dressed in dark trousers, T-shirt, and socks, idly scanning a hand-viewer. He glanced up in mild irritation at Leo, unfamiliar to him, then his eyes widened as he saw Silver. Leo dumped Silver as unceremoniously as a cat on the foot of the bed, and plopped into the cubicle's sole chair to catch his breath. "Ti Gulik. Gotta talk to you."

  Ti had recoiled to the head of the bed, knees drawn up, hand viewer rolled aside and forgotten. "Silver! What the hell are you doing here? Who's this guy?" He jerked a thumb at Leo.

  "Tony's welding teacher. Leo Graf," answered Silver smearily. Experimentally, she rolled over and pushed her torso upright with her upper hands. "This feels weird." She raised her upper hands, balancing, Leo thought, for all the world like a seal on a tripod formed by her lower arms. "Huh." She returned her upper hands to the bed, to lend support, achieving a dog-like posture, fine hair flattened, all her grace stolen by gravity. No doubt about it, quaddies belonged in null-gee.